FINALS!

So the time has to recall what it was I was doing at the beginning of the semester when my college experience first began. The process of going through old notes and concepts has even brought out a bit of nostalgia in me. It feels good to see that I have understood and learned new theories and methods that I have never heard of or been able to understand before hand. College is definitely a much more rigorous curriculum because a lot of times in high school it felt like I was treading water but at UIUC I have picked up so many new ideas in such a short period of time. I still remember when I was first learning KVL for solving circuits or trying to remember how the heck I did stoichiometry problems in high school chem.

One of the most rewarding experiences that I have had here was having calculus introduced to me. I moved my senior year of high school from Lubbock, TX to Kansas City, MO and due to scheduling complications, I wasn't able to fit in Calculus into my semesters. So, naturally, as an engineer I took Calc 221 this semester and it has been incredible! It is such an interesting and applicable branch of mathematics. Beautiful in its precision and incredible due to the fact that humans have a use the concept of infinity which translates into limits. I really regret not being able to take it in high school where I would have had the more direct learning approach which high school offers in its small class sizes.
Too bad the final for it is 8am-11am on Friday the 18th. :C

In any case, time to hit the books!

Music 199: Music, Science, & Technology

Last summer during registration I decided to enroll myself in a "discovery" class with a very interesting title: Music, Science, and Technology. The relationship between music and technology/electronics is easily seen in our modern western culture. They share much common ground and the products of the two are some of the most beautiful things that I have heard so I was eager to enroll in it and it hasn't let me down.

The class covered a wide aspect of topics: the history of computer music, fundamental ideas in computer music and recording, sound synthesis using computers etc. This all sounds very exciting and cutting edge but in my opinion, the most interesting part of the course came up when we were actually listening to some of the final works of music which were made with these 20th+ century techniques. The immediate question that confronted me when listening to some of these strange compositions was: can I call this music? Do I even find it aesthetically pleasing? Even if I don't, is there an objective answer that defines what music is?

The final part of the class was learning to use an online software, soundmaker, that was develop here at UIUC and make a common composition together as a class.
It sounds like a hell of a mess, and it is. Yet the questions still arise.

Our professor posted it online:
http://ems.music.uiuc.edu/courses/tipei/M199/final09.wav

Electrical & Computer Engineering 110

This has been by far the most difficult class that I have this semester. It is meant to introduce the freshman student to the basics of ECE and boy, it sure does that. The course has covered such a wide array of material and I know that this just the beginning. We have covered so much ground: how to solve a circuit like a sudoku game (Brunet's analogy), what common components like transistors and diodes are, the binary and hexa number system (about time for me), how high and low voltages transmit to logical 1's and 0's, how logic gates interpret and make functions out of said 1's & 0's, sequential gates, data sampling & encryption, and so much more.

For me, this is the equivalent of being throw into cold water. I have had no prior experience with these matters except for a short overview in my physics class in high school. The pace of the course is intense but help is available and our teachers are passionate about their material. I feel that this is a very rewarding experience however because I can honestly say I have learned so much in a short period of time and it has been able to hook my interest and make me more enthusiastic about my major.

On the same note, I have had no programming experience whatsoever, so I'm reallllly looking forward to ECE 190 next semester. I'm sure it will be just as intense and involving as 110.

Autonomous Car x 2

Currently, for our lab component of the ECE 110 class, we were required to build an autonomous car that can navigate a course of white tape on black which has splits and sharp turns. The design of such a car pushed us to implement our theoretical knowledge from lecture and physically apply it. We've had to use a wide range of concepts such as transistors, logic gate functions, binary values, resistance, A/D conversion sampling, Mux selector chips, and most importantly, intuitive thinking.

The idea of such a car has been around since the time technology has begun to exponentially boom; in an old Soviet film, an autonomous car escapes from a laboratory and as man walks by it drinking milk, the self directing car sends him running out of fear and spilling milk from his. The car begins to follow the milk trail he produces and this becomes the final straw for him (in Mother Russia, car drive you!). Such technological capabilities are not intimidating anymore and are now considered basic in the spectrum of electronics. For this lab, we had to design all of the circuitry to make our car move independently using only information picked up by infrared sensors which can distinguish white from black.


In our Engineering 198 class, we were assigned to do a project with an Arduino controller and were simply told, "make it move." Our group had many ideas but when I told them what our ECE 110 class was doing in lab, all of them immediately gained interest. So we decided to do a similar construction, except this one being mostly software based for the logic. And so we did.
It was a little more basic without any split track detection capabilities or such but it was still very interesting to do the project from a different perspective.